Democrat Blames Loss to El-Sayed on Fake Polling as Wedgewood’s ‘Social Experiment’ Exposes the ‘Pollercoaster’

A Michigan state senator, Mallory McMorrow, is blaming a hoax for hurting her campaign and helping an opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, win the Democratic Senate primary. It’s just one race where Wedgewood Polling’s “social experiment” is spotlighting how numbers reported in the press are shaping, rather than reflecting, public opinion.On Tuesday, FiftyPlusOne reported that they had prompted Wedgewood’s confession by requesting “comment on an investigation … into their alleged survey research.” The ersatz pollsters reacted by posting “a public statement on social media admitting that they had been fabricating data,” saying they’d found it “too easy” to dupe the press.Wedgewood wrote that they had “no history, formal credentials, or real data behind the vast majority of our releases.” Yet its polling data “was added to major polling aggregators, including the New York Times, FiftyPlusOne, and VoteHub, and repeatedly treated as a legitimate data source.” MS NOW also cited them.On Wednesday, the FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, wrote on X that “there has been a significant surge in entirely fake polls and suppression polls” and asserted that “broadcasters are prohibited” from “engaging in news distortion or promoting broadcast hoaxes.” He posted on Thursday that “the New York Times has now removed 15 entirely fake polls” from “its tracking surveys.”FiftyPlusOne calls the allegation that they cited Wedgewood “false,” noting that they “reached out to them to ask who they were and confirm the methodology statement on their website.” The timeline backs this account. As soon as the hoaxers received the blog’s inquiry, they publicized that the fabrications were meant to be “a wake-up call.”The release, since deleted along with Wedgewood’s X account, explained that American democracy had been subjected to an “experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry.” The goal was to “expose how little scrutinization exists in media and public commentary.”The incident recalls an anecdote that a comic legend, Jay Leno, shared on “The Adam Carolla Show” in September 2025. In the 1980s, Mr. Leno said, the New York Post, Time magazine, and others reported that his had been “named Best Face to Caricature by the American Caricatures Association.”Mr. Leno said that he’d had “fake stationery made” with the nonexistent group’s name on the letterhead and “sent out a press release.” He recalled the event as both amusing and eye-opening. “It’s the news,” he said. “They don’t check anything. … Everybody’s lazy. You can just get away with whatever you want.”Wedgewood wrote that they “never intended to sway an election or permanently mislead the public.” They said that “if a fictional entity run by a small group of industry veterans can be integrated into major polling averages and cited by major news organizations, the standards for how polling data is vetted, aggregated, and reported must change.”Regardless of Wedgewood’s intent, Ms. McMorrow wrote that one “infamous” poll from the group “showed me plummeting into single digits” two months before Michigan’s primary. “The impact of this ‘experiment’” was that “donations dried up,” “volunteers were devastated,” and “reporters hounded me … to drop out.”Ms. McMorrow wrote that the press “loves to ride the drama of a pollercoaster,” and in the wake of the Wedgewood hoax, it “needs to take a hard look at what’s legitimate and what’s not. If this teaches us anything,” she said, it’s “don’t get complacent and don’t trust the polls.”President Trump echoed her doubts on Tuesday at a North Carolina rally. “I look forward to November 3rd,” he said, “because I think you’re going to see some amazing results. They never poll us right.” Only a poll by Los Angeles Times/USC had predicted his victory in 2016. In December 2024, NBC News reported that polls “understated” Mr. Trump’s “support in virtually every state.”Wedgewood, by exposing the “pollercoaster,” is forcing the press and the public to question numbers from surveys and the emerging prediction markets. The flood of dubious data is muddying the facts that Americans rely upon to cast informed votes, while making an old political cliché ring truer than ever: The only poll that matters is on Election Day.

Democrat Blames Loss to El-Sayed on Fake Polling as Wedgewood’s ‘Social Experiment’ Exposes the ‘Pollercoaster’

Democrat Blames Loss to El-Sayed on Fake Polling as Wedgewood’s ‘Social Experiment’ Exposes the ‘Pollercoaster’

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